The Coldest Fear Read online

  Jack remembered noticing the cuts on the scalp when he had first viewed the scene. “What about them?”

  “What do those cuts look like to you?” she asked, impatiently.

  Jack moved the hair to get a better look at the deep cuts, then gave Lilly an inquiring look. The cuts looked like numbers.

  “Three seventy-five?” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” Lilly agreed. “That’s what it looks like to me, too.”

  Little Casket was in charge of the body now. A couple of techs would escort her to the parking lot, where they would load it into the cargo area of the coroner’s wagon. And then Lilly, like Charon, the ferryman of Hades, would carry the soul of the newly deceased across the river Styx into the world of the dead.

  This is death in all its glory, Jack thought. He stood beside the doorway to the bathroom, where techs were finishing collecting evidence, and pulled his phone from his pocket.

  “Hi, handsome,” Susan said, answering the call.

  “I just wondered what you were doing,” he said in a low voice.

  “What color panties am I wearing? Is that what you mean, honey?” she said and giggled.

  “Well, I was actually going to tell you what I’m not wearing,” he said. The crime scene tech in the bathroom yelled, “Get a room.”

  “What was that?” Susan asked.

  “Nothing,” Jack said, and pointed a finger at the grinning tech.

  “I’m going to have to go into a meeting in a minute,” Susan said, and Jack could hear someone calling to her.

  “How about meeting at Two-Jakes later for supper?” Jack asked. It was a date he hoped he would be able to keep.

  Susan sighed contentedly. “At least you’re still asking.”

  “I promise that I’ll try to be there,” Jack said, feeling a little defensive. Her birthday was just four days away and he needed to pick her brains about what she wanted. He was thinking of a jogging outfit.

  “Then the answer is yes. Gotta go,” she said, and they hung up.

  For a moment he wondered what it would be like to have a normal life. To not have to get up to his elbows in the messes that anyone in their right mind would run away from. Is this any kind of life to offer a woman? he thought.

  When he’d married his ex-wife, Katie, he’d been a policeman for a just few years, but he already had a pretty good idea what their life would be like. His father had been a cop, and he, his younger brother, and his younger sister had always felt that the only parent in their lives was their mother. His dad was always unavailable, either sleeping, working, or on some other type of police activity.

  Katie’s life had been different. Her father was a high school teacher, her mother a stay-at-home mom. Katie only had good family memories. Vacations, holidays, visiting relatives, all the things that a well-adjusted family would experience. But then, she was an only child, and the worst problem her father had to deal with might be an unruly student.

  Jack’s family life was much different and he had been made to grow up very fast. He still remembered his mother telling him, “I depend on you, Jack. It’s your duty to look out for the little ones.” And he had been doing that his whole life. His brother and sister were both happily married with families of their own now, but Jack still did his best to protect them. Maybe that was why he had become a cop like his father. He had grown up protecting people who were weaker.

  He knew Katie had wanted children, and he wished he could have given her the two-point-three children that every family in the United States boasted. But he had always been held back by the reality of evil in the world. How could he bring children into that, knowing that he might not be home if they needed him?

  And that led him to another thought. Did Susan want kids? They’d never talked about it.

  He looked at his watch and wondered what was taking Liddell so long. The man had only gone down to the front desk to get a list of employees and guests who were in the hotel last night.

  He was absentmindedly leaning in the bathroom doorway when the tech said, “Got something here, Jack.”

  The tech used a pair of plastic tweezers to pick something out of the bloody water that remained in the bathtub and held it up. Jack stepped into the small bathroom and shut the door behind them.

  Both men looked at the item. It was obviously fleshy and Jack put words to his thoughts, “Is that a tongue?”

  The tech nodded, and said, “Yeah. I think so.”

  Officer Morris had been with Crime Scene Unit for seven years now and had seen some crazy shit in his day, but this was up there in the top five. “I pulled the stopper and when the water wouldn’t drain I felt around. This was stuck in the drain under the plug.”

  “Her tongue?” Jack asked.

  Morris shrugged. “I don’t know if anyone looked in her mouth.”

  “Anyone else see this yet?”

  Morris shook his head. “I just found it.”

  Jack knew that something like this wouldn’t remain secret long. “You collect this,” Jack said, “and not a word to anyone outside of Sergeant Walker, Liddell, and me.”

  With Jansen showing up at the scene like he did, Jack didn’t want to take a chance that this would leak before they could even verify that the tongue—if that’s what it was—belonged to the victim.

  “You, me, Liddell, and Walker,” Jack said. “Put nothing in the computer yet.”

  Morris cocked his head.

  Jack said, “I’m going to get Walker. Keep the door shut.”

  The killer was in the catbird seat. Evansville Police cars were everywhere, and uniformed officers stood at all the entrances to the Marriott. He knew they would be inside as well, guarding all the stairways, asking questions, checking to see if there was video and all the other things that policemen were apt to do. But nothing they did would trip him up. He was too good at this. Better at my job than they are at theirs, he mused.

  Five years and countless bodies had given him the upper hand. He was like a wind, or a fleeting thought. There one moment, and gone the next. This was the seventh state he had chosen to visit, and he had left a slew of bodies in his trail. In one state he was called The Axe Man. In another he had been dubbed The Handy Man. Yet another, probably more aptly, described him as The Cleaver.

  But in all his travels he had never heard his real name. And in that anonymity he felt comfortable and yet disappointed. What had started as a mission to rid the earth of the scum like his father had turned into a killing spree with no purpose other than the killing itself. In fact, it was getting quite boring.

  And then he had happened to find a news article online about a detective in Evansville, Indiana, who thought he was some kind of badass. He’d been intrigued. He remembered thinking that it might be fun to go to Evansville. It had been five years since he had been anywhere near his birthplace in Illinois, and Evansville was only a stone’s throw away.

  There is an old saying that goes, You can never go home again. But it’s wrong. He did come home. And now the fun was just beginning.

  CHAPTER SIX

  The weatherman had predicted a warm and sunny day, but Louise Brigham looked up at the darkening sky and recognized the makings of a thunderstorm. The clothes she had washed in the sink that morning still lay in the laundry basket waiting to be hung on the makeshift clothesline she had strung between her apartment and the one behind her.

  Project housing allowed for very little in the way of a yard, so the closeness of the buildings was used for other things, such as hanging wash and giving the children a safe place to play under the constant eye of one neighbor or another.

  Louise brought the clothes basket back into the kitchen and let out a sigh. The nearest Laundromat was twelve blocks away, and through some of the worst neighborhoods in Evansville. Even the police seemed to avoid those areas unless they were in groups. But from what she had heard on Channel Six news on television this morning, there were other parts of the city that were just as dangerous. Some type of murder
investigation was going on at that big hotel out by the airport.

  She hadn’t always lived like this. At one time she had been married to a good man and had a high-paying job. Back then she still had a good figure and nice features and the world had looked bright and promising. She would never have dreamed it would end up like this a mere five years later.

  She looked down at the basket of wet clothes. They won’t dry themselves, she thought.

  She went to the closet to get her Windbreaker—the only jacket that she owned. When she pulled the door open she noticed something wasn’t quite right. Then she heard a noise behind her.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  They now had a name for the victim at the Marriott. Cordelia Morse. It said so on her Illinois driver’s license and on a library card for the Gallatin County Public Library. The address on the driver’s license was for a post-office box in Shawneetown, Illinois. Jack had heard of the town, and the things he’d heard weren’t flattering.

  Her purse was found in the hotel room’s closet along with a lightweight jacket. The jacket pockets contained the usual items—a travel pack of Kleenex, some change, and a small scrap of paper with nothing on it. The purse, however, was a gold mine.

  Crime scene would be at the Marriott for the rest of the day, but by eight o’clock that morning, Jack and Liddell decided to split up to follow up on the scant information they had extracted from the scene. This case promised to be challenging. Not only because the victim was from another state, but because the amount of violence done to the body indicated so many things.

  The killing could be a domestic homicide, a husband or boyfriend thing where he catches her in Evansville seeing someone else and snaps. But she had registered at the Marriott for a week, and there had been no calls to or from her room, so that kind of eliminated the domestic issues.

  Of course, the lack of calls could mean that she had used a cell phone, although no cell phone was found at the scene. But why would the killer take the phone and nothing else? The killer did take something, Jack reminded himself. He took her face and her eyes and her hand. The tongue was another matter. What did that mean?

  One of the crime scene techs had also found a set of keys on the floor under the bed—an electronic key that was probably a car key, and two or three well-worn keys. Maybe dropped by the victim and ended up under the bed during the struggle, Jack thought. The keys were attached to a faux-diamond-studded letter C. C for Cordelia, the name on the driver’s license?

  Jack stepped out of the back foyer of the hotel and into the parking lot. Black clouds moved to the north and thunder rumbled in the distance. It was unusual to have thunderstorms this late in October. He hoped the rain would hold off at least until he could find the victim’s car and have it secured by Crime Scene.

  Holding the black plastic key in the air, he pressed the red rectangular button. Twenty or so yards away a car alarm went off. Jack followed the sound until he spotted the red Toyota whose lights were flashing. He silenced the alarm and called Sergeant Walker’s cell phone.

  “Found her car,” he said when Tony came on the phone.

  “I heard,” Tony said. “I’ll send someone.”

  A few minutes later a female crime scene tech pulled up in a marked car. She was as tall as Jack, strongly built, and he imagined that if her hair wasn’t pulled back into a tight ponytail, she would be a knockout. She looked like a bodybuilder, her face angular and sharp but pretty.

  “Hello, Detective Murphy,” she said, and they shook hands.

  Jack had been expecting someone who was already on scene to come out of the hotel and process the vehicle.

  She noticed his hesitance and said, “Officer Martin.” Her voice was deep and pleasant, almost sultry, but she was all business. When he still didn’t speak, she said, “Don’t worry, Detective Murphy. I may be new—and a woman—but I’m very competent.”

  “I have no doubt,” Jack said, a little offended by her attitude. Maybe more offended that she was slightly on target about his thought process. “I just wondered how much you know about what is going on here, Officer Martin.”

  Instead of answering right away she slipped on a pair of gloves and pulled a digital camera from her vehicle. “You’ll tell me what I need to know. So what are we looking for, sir?” She offered Jack a pair of gloves, but he declined.

  “The car should be fingerprinted first before we open it,” he said, and walked a little away and called Sergeant Walker.

  “Tony, Officer Martin is here, but I think she may need another pair of hands.”

  “Sorry, Jack. I’m out of officers. You’ll have to be her backup.”

  Jack put the phone back in his pocket and walked back to the young tech. “It appears that I’m your backup.”

  She grinned and offered him the gloves again. “Well then, let’s get to it.”

  For the next fifteen minutes Jack alternately watched and/or handed Officer Martin fingerprint brushes, print-lift kits, and her various cameras, until she declared the car securely fingerprinted on the outside and pertinent areas inside. Jack had to admit that she was very competent, and probably more thorough than some of the more experienced crime scene officers that he knew. He had to resist the impulse to tell her that she had done excellent work, for fear that this might be taken as a gender-biased remark.

  “What now?” he asked.

  She opened the driver’s door of the Toyota. “You can look inside, but not get inside. Please don’t disturb anything,” she said, and then seeing the look on his face, added, “sir.”

  There was nothing in plain view inside the vehicle, or in the trunk, but in the glove box he found the rental agreement. Otherwise, the car was so clean and tidy it didn’t appear to have been driven. Jack doubted the killer had been in it, but it would still be towed to storage for a thorough examination by Walker’s crew.

  Jack straightened up and stretched his back, and said, “Thanks for the assistance, Officer Martin.”

  “I’ll have it towed to our garage. We’ll call you when it’s been processed, sir.”

  Jack slipped off the latex gloves and stuck them in his pocket, then pulled out his notebook and wrote down the description of the car, including license plates and location in the parking lot.

  The rental agreement was from Alamo Rent A Car at Evansville Dress Regional Airport, less than a mile away. Why would she rent a car from there? he wondered. The answer might be at Alamo. His next stop.

  Jack called Liddell from Alamo’s rental office inside the airport.

  “The red Toyota I found in the parking lot was paid for by a guy named Jonathan Samuels,” Jack said. “Same post-office box number in Shawneetown, Illinois, as our victim. Are you back at headquarters?”

  “Yeah,” Liddell said. “I’m running Cordelia Morse through the system. Whoever killed her wasn’t after money. There was almost three thousand dollars in twenty-dollar bills in the purse.”

  “The injuries weren’t to hide her identity,” Jack said.

  “Yeah,” Liddell agreed.

  “Check her out with narcotics,” Jack said.

  “You think she was dealing?” Liddell asked.

  “She left her own car behind at Alamo when she picked up the Toyota,” Jack said. “There was a small bag of marijuana tucked under the driver’s seat.”

  “But not three grand worth?”

  “No,” Jack admitted. “But it’s possible she was going to buy drugs and use the rental car to transport. That would keep her personal car free from possibly being seized by the government if she were caught.”

  “So it could be a drug deal gone bad?” Liddell asked.

  Jack didn’t think someone would go to the extremes that were evident in the death of Cordelia Morse for three thousand dollars. And then not even take the money. Something else was going on here.

  “I don’t have a clue yet, but when I get it all figured out I’ll let you take all the credit as usual, Bigfoot,” Jack said with a smile.


  “You are so good to me,” Liddell said.

  “I found something else,” Jack said, becoming serious again. “There was a business card for one of the Bange brothers. Lenny Bange. It was on the floor of her rental car.”

  “Bange, Bange, Bange,” Liddell said. He was very familiar with the three brothers. All were attorneys and ran a lucrative practice in the downtown area.

  “Run Lenny Bange and Jonathan Samuels of Shawneetown, Illinois, too,” Jack said.

  “I’m running down the names of people who stayed at the hotel last night and calling them. Is there anything else you’d like me to do? Like maybe solve the world’s food-shortage problem, and bring about world peace while I’m not busy?”

  “That would be nice, Bigfoot.”

  “Speaking of food, where we going to eat?” Liddell asked.

  Jack felt a little hungry, too, but he wanted to keep going while he had something to work on. And Lenny Bange was the next lead. “I’ll grab a sandwich on my way to Lenny Bange’s office.”

  “I’ll order a pizza then,” Liddell said.

  Jack knew that meant two large kitchen-sink pizzas from Turoni’s were about to meet their death at the hands of the Cajun-ator.

  They hung up and Jack sat in his car looking at Lenny Bange’s card and the small plastic Baggie of marijuana. Room 316 at the Marriott, where Cordelia Morse was found hacked to death, had been paid for by a credit card. That card belonged to Lenny Bange. The car she had at the hotel was paid for by a man named Jonathan Samuels. Very curious, he thought. Cordelia Morse seemed to have a knack for getting guys to pay her bills.

  He wondered what other talents she had.

  CHAPTER EIGHT

  Three uniformed officers stood in the hallway, guns drawn, expressions chiseled out of granite, as Jack and another officer stood on each side of the door to room 375. The killer would have to be stupid or suicidal to have left such a clue and then to hang around to be caught. But the fact was that room 316, where Cordelia Morse was found butchered, was at the opposite end of the hall from room 375. And the killer had carved the number 375 into her scalp.